Summary
Alleviate recognised for "Excellence in Public Engagement" by the School of Medicine, University of Dundee
Public and Patient Involvement and Engagement (PPIE) is embedded in the design of the Alleviate Pain Data Hub. Over the first three years of the Hub, we built an active community of over 300 people, have two lay leads and four experts by experience who are part of our core team.
Our endeavours to co-produce our work with public members has previously been recognised with a Letter of Commendation for PPIE from HDR UK as well as winning best poster at the Advanced Pain Discover Platform Conference 2023 for our ‘Embedding PPIE in the Alleviate Pain Data Hub’ poster.
In January this year, we received three further awards. Our Deputy Director, Gordon Milligan, was recognised with a Science for All badge for his exceptional commitment to bridging the gap between scientific research and public engagement. He was also awarded the Inspirational Colleague award at this year’s Dundee Difference awards.
Alleviate was further awarded The Ian Stevenson Award for Excellence in Public Engagement by the School of Medicine.
Gordon Milligan, Inspirational Colleague Award
Various activities have been pertinent for Alleviate’s success, including social media campaigns, hosting webinars and design workshops to capture what we do and make it easy to understand, as well as being accessible for general population. All of these activities are in collaboration with our PPIE group, they are co-authors on our publications, our campaigns feature them and their lived experience. They are the reason we can connect with the public to give visibility to our research and ultimately increase the impact our research.
“Not only do these awards allow us to enhance the public’s understanding and awareness of research performed at the School and the impact this research has on our everyday lives but allow our research to benefit from engagement with the wider community.”
Judith fisher, PPie Co-ordinator
The Alleviate Hub is proud that our efforts to engage with the public, and giving them opportunities to engage with us, are working and that this is being recognised by the wider scientific community. We are also proud of our experts by experience, and wider community, who give so much of their time to engage with us and help ensure our work is relevant to patients and the public and do so, quite often, through their own personal hardships.
The Alleviate Pain Data Hub is a £2M collaborative project funded by a consortium of funders including Versus Arthritis and the UK Medical Research Council. The project is led by the University of Dundee and involves partners from across the UK. Alleviate is one of nine HDR UK Health Data Research Hubs.
More information is available on the Alleviate Pain Data Hub website, and X, Bluesky or subscribe to our newsletter for regular updates and join our community.